ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 67 



were laid down over your plains ? Nay, have we not 

 proved more ? Have we not found that that old sea 

 was an icy sea ? Have we not wandered on, step by 

 step, into a whole true fairyland of wonders ? to a 

 time when all England, Scotland, and Ireland were as 

 Greenland is now? when mud streams have rushed 

 down from under glaciers on to a cold sea-bottom, 

 when "ice, mast high, came floating by, as green 

 as emerald ? " when Snowdon was sunk for at least 

 fourteen hundred feet of its height ? when (as I could 

 prove to you, had I time) the peaks of the highest 

 Cumberland and Scotch mountains alone stood out, as 

 islets in a frozen sea ? 



We want to get an answer to one strange question, 

 and we have found a group of questions stranger still, 

 and got them answered too. But so it is always in 

 science. We know not what we shall discover. But 

 this, at least, we know, that it will be far more won- 

 derful than we had dreamed. The scientific explorer 

 is always like Saul of old, who set out simply to find 

 his father's asses, and found them and a kingdom 

 besides. 



I should have liked to have told you more about 

 this bygone age of ice. I should have liked to say 

 something to you on the curious question which is 

 still an open one whether there were not two ages of 

 ice ; whether the climate here did not, after perhaps 

 thousands of years of Arctic cold, soften somewhat for 

 a while a few thousand years, perhaps and then 

 harden again into a second age of ice, somewhat less 

 severe, probably, than the first. I should have liked 

 to have hinted at the probable causes of this change 

 indeed, of the age of ice altogether whether it was 



p 2 



